In Germany large companies have a “betriebsrat”, which is a workers council to represent the employees in the company. Depending on the size of the company depends on how many representatives there will be on this workers council. The representatives for this post are elected from the employees who work at the company. It is a pretty good gig, as once you are elected to such a position, your job is to represent the workers and no longer do your previous position. If your company is really large, then these representatives come from the different groups that make up your company, such as machinists, line workers, etc.
Every year when election time comes time for the voting, just like any good politician these representatives start visiting their constituency with gifts. There is most likely not a very large budget for these gifts so the representatives almost always come with a yearly calendar in hand, showing the different national holidays.
It is actually fairly funny as over a couple week period it is possible to get four or five such visitors with gifts. But by definition, these people are representing the employees of the company. If you happen to be a visitor or even worse an external consultant they don’t want to waste their precious time with you. Well, in some cases they don’t want to shower you with gifts either.
It turned out that one of these representatives came into our room and really didn’t speak with us at all, she was just handing out calendars when one of us make a critical mistake. He thanked her for the calendar whereas she started to questioning if he worked for the company, which of course he did not. This mistake was compounded by informing her that none of us worked for the company at which start came back to each desk and took the calendar back from each of these external contractors. It is probably best that we could not vote in this election as none of us were very impressed with her attitude.